


For the souls I've left to die

by Satan In Purple (purple_satan)



Series: Snarky Science Wives of Overwatch [2]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Infatuation, Moicy, Moira's totally a narcissist so you know that shit didn't go well, Past Relationship(s), but they still miss each other maybe sometimes, enemies to lovers to still enemies, look man this ship needs more fics okay?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 02:46:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12785274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purple_satan/pseuds/Satan%20In%20Purple
Summary: The only upper hand Angela's ever held in the entirety of their interactions was not giving in to Moira’s always offered one to drag her down with her to the depths of hell.





	For the souls I've left to die

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to think Moira is that _"oh shit my ex"_ that showed up looking way too fresh to the point late with Starbucks and just like flat out leering at Mercy, as Mercy suddenly valkyries away saying she's gotta go heal someone *cough*genji*cough* to not deal with her past or her own problems. 
> 
> Basically, I love her.
> 
> Also I feel like I don't know jack about overwatch lore now that I'm writing fic for it. I just play the game (badly, might I add), so if any of this is wrong... it's fanfic?

 

_Schieße!_

Angela curses bitterly as she drops the papers she was carrying back to the lab. From the doorway she can see mismatched eyes watch her movements deliberately, a smirk unfurling on thin lips she’d rather see vanish in a puff of smoke where they just as likely came from, since she certainly didn’t waltz through the front door.

It wasn’t as though Moira’s appearance in her lab was one to be entirely unexpected, just... _detested_.

“Well, if it isn’t _dein Schutzengel_ herself,” Moira announces, long limbs unfolding gracefully from the chair she’s lounging in, leafing through her latest notes. “You’ve made some amazing progress since I last saw you.”

As she stands, Angela bends down to retrieve the papers that have scattered across the floor, eyes anywhere but to the woman creeping just in her line of vision. The pistol at her side suddenly feels acutely out of her grasp, even though she knows she could likely draw it in time.

She lingers for a moment too long, fingers twitching as she hears the footsteps approach in front of her.

_"_ _Angela.”_

The name tumbles from her lips like a prayer, like a curse. Softly, _intimately._

Something she didn’t have the right to anymore, never did in the first place. Which fell in line with precisely everything she had ever known the other woman to do.  

Angela looks up to see Moira towering over her, holding one of the pages in her long fingered hands. In the austere light of the lab she looks different than the last time she saw her, before she left. Even more angular, more sinister. What little there was soft about her replaced with more harsh lines and jagged planes, less and less human.

If asked, Moira would probably scathingly reply she was _evolving_ in that self-aggrandizing, narcissistic way that got her into trouble in the first place.

“Dr. O’Deorain,” she replies stiffly, getting up from the floor and moving towards the nearest surface to break their line of sight. She masks taking a deep, shuddering breath by dropping the papers unceremoniously on the counter. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Is that any way to treat an old friend?”

“We were never _friends,”_ Angela hisses, not exactly lying nor telling the whole truth. Contemptuous at best, her relationship with Moira had mostly consisted of the two of them engaged in an occasionally exhilarating mutual game of mental chess, trying to outwit and outmaneuver the other. Whether it be the lab or— _elsewhere._

 _"Tch,”_ Moira tuts, and Angela feels the faintest brush of sharp fingernails raking down the back of her white lab coat. The bitter tang of ozone and the acrid smell of smoke that somehow clinged to the other woman despite the antiseptic smell of the lab she was always in, fills her nostrils and she tries not to breathe in too deeply.

“Friendly, then.”

“ _Mein gott_ , Moira. Now’s not the time. Take whatever information you came for and go. I have no interest in playing games with you or the past anymore.”

“No?” The voice behind her an innocent lilt. Angela feels the hairs on the back of her neck raise in alarm, a warning, as the taller woman gets even closer.

“All sorts of games we used to play here, _mo stoirín._ I especially liked the ones where you put on the cute, little—”

_"Don’t remind me.”_

"Manners,” Moira admonishes. “Anyway, if I didn’t want you to see me, you wouldn’t have.” Twirling a lock of hair that escaped her ponytail around one of her long finger, she tugs hard enough Angela  can feel the pull on her scalp. “Turn around. I want to see _you_ , Angela. Unlike you, I can face my past.”

A defiant part of her, the same that made her butt heads with superiors in the past, wants to childishly disobey. Moira tended to be good at bringing that rebellious side out of her, always pushing her. Pushing her to come up with better ideas, better solutions. Pushing her to strategize, to find more complex ways to outmatch her. Pushing her almost past her limits, just to watch her toe perilously close to the edge she had already fallen off of long ago, the one not even Angela could save her from.

She’s saved so many people, but Moira always seemed to be just out of her grasp. Just beyond ever being able to be rescued from anything. Especially her own egotism, the flaw in her design.

Turning around she meets Moira’s eyes. One red, one blue like her own. Foreign and familiar. A byproduct of “a suitable margin of error” during an experiment, something bigger clicking into place at the revelation. Moira rarely owned up to her failures as thus to anyone, chosing to rename and catalogue them as something entirely else before plunging headfirst into the next thing, more interested in results. Something to leave a legacy to be remembered by, something tangible.

(She had once slyly commented after long hours at the lab one day about being more _hands-on_. Angela had blushed at such a brash statement and hadn’t realized exactly how true the words had been until some hours later when she’d been backed up against a wall both literally _and_ metaphorically speaking, as Moira tested a theory and Angela chased the woman's lips with her own.)

“You’ve changed again,” Angela replies rather dumbly, but the other woman’s eyes soften a bit around the edges at the words. Moira's lips quirk up into a lopsided grin as she looms over the her, easily a full head taller. Copper hair shining like burnt pennies in the lighting, Angela resists the urge to run her fingers through the short strands so unlike her own.

“And you haven’t changed a bit.”

Moira chuckles, thumb running along the edge of Angela’s jaw. “One wonders how you seem to never age. Nary a wrinkle or gray hair since I last saw you.”

“Good genes.”

“Clever. But as the actual geneticist here, I’ll be the judge of that."

Just like that it's easy for them to slip into the banter that once filled both their lives. For Angela, it's always The Time Before. A time in her life when Moira O’Deorain was a constant in it. Taunting her, touching her, invading her space. Reminding her she was always there. At the time it felt annoyingly like she _would always be there_ , not just a persistent memory that vanished without a trace only to apparate back into her lab years later.

 _"Care to submit a sample for testing?”_ she replies, mocking Angela’s own accent crudely.

“To you?”

Angela actually snorts, nose wrinkling up in distaste at what horrid possibilities briefly flash through her mind of her DNA in the hands of the someone both unethically inclined and infatuated with her. The only upper hand she’s held in the entirety of their interactions was not giving in to Moira’s always offered one to drag her down with her to the depths of hell once she fully realized the extent of the other woman's madness.

“ _Never.”_

“Afraid I’ll clone you or some other—” Moira inches closer, licking her lips and hovering only a hair’s breadth away, “ _wicked_ thing?”

A full shiver runs up her spine Angela can’t suppress. Raw animal fear the other woman might cross lines even she has to know she couldn’t come back from, as the hand tracing her jaw grips it tightly. Long talons bite into the soft flesh of her neck, as a thumb presses against her chin, tilting it up. Angela sees the white of the ceiling, squinting at the fluorescent lighting in her eyes. She feels her own pulse jump, heartbeat lodged in her throat, as she feels Moira’s hand creep up her thigh far too intimately.

But it’s just to disarm her of her pistol, dropping it to the floor with a loud _clack,_ before kicking it away gracelessly out of reach.

“Thing is, love, no one will ever be you. And I’ll never tire of playing with you.”

“Moira,” she pleads, voice cracking. Hoping it’s still just a game. “Just take what you came for and _go_.”

A moment passes, both women breathing in and out, before she feels lips press harshly on her temple. It’s achingly familiar in a way that stings her to her very core. The same lips that were never kind, except for the rare praise she seemed to only dole out to Angela, and still ever only on even rarer occasions.

Angela closes her eyes, exhales through her nose. Steels herself and hopes that relenting, that passivity, was the right choice.

It doesn't happen again there, or anywhere else.

Chuckling, Moira lets go of her completely and the dread finally starts draining from Angela’s body, beginning from her core until it leaves through her fingers and her toes. When her body loosens and her eyes flutter open, she sees Moira smirking in front of her, holding her notes just out of arm’s reach.

“Be careful, love. Next time I might take you up on that offer.”

“Next time I’ll shoot before you can,” she spits out, but even to her own ears her voice sounds like an empty threat. A tired song and dance they've done one too many times in their long lives both with and without each other.

 _"Slán abhaile, mo stoirín,”_ the other woman replies, bowing as she vanishes in a puff of black smoke. It leaves the air in the lab around her like a what Angela imagines a lightning strike tastes close up, all ozone and crackling energy on your tongue and in your nostrils. Something fleeting, metallic, and far too dangerous to be in proximity of.

She rolls the first two words around in her head, trying to remember their meaning.

Slán abhaile?

— _she whispered it once after kissing her, back when both her eyes were blue and their pupils blown wide. Her lips were debauched pink, voice rough around the edges. Eyes apologetic, like she didn’t want to leave. Like something else was dragging her away. Like she hadn’t fallen off that cliff just yet, but knew she was going to soon and wanted to say it before_ —

_Slán abhaile._

_Goodbye._

 

But it’s never really goodbye for them.

**Author's Note:**

> [aicosu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aicosu) this is _your fault._
> 
> come find me @ either [purple-satan-fic](http://purple-satan-fic.tumblr.com/) for my fic or [emberashcosplay](http://emberashcosplay.tumblr.com/) for more gaming/overwatch stuff on tumblr!
> 
> title from "ava adore" by the smashing pumpkins, which is the kinda shit i imagine on a moicy playlist. idk, i'm weird like that.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [For the souls I've left to die (Podfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13271112) by [Tat_Tat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tat_Tat/pseuds/Tat_Tat)




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